Watching Eagles Soar by Margaret Coel Page B

moving in and out of the pale streams of light.
    Parked at the edge of the road was a line of vehicles: A couple of BIA police cars, the red Jeep that Ted Gianelli, the local FBI agent, drove, and the white van Father O’Malley had seen at other death scenes: the coroner’s wagon. Father John parked behind the wagon.
    As he started across the bare dirt yard, he spotted Gianelli coming toward him. A big man, with the rounded shoulders and thick neck and the long, graceful strides of the linebacker he had once been. The light pouring out of the house shone in his dark hair and cast his face in shadow. “What happened?” Father John asked when the agent was still a few feet away.
    â€œScott Whitebird took a slug in the back of the head, execution style.” The agent glanced back toward the house, and for a moment, light glinted in his deep-set eyes. “Seen too many homicides like this. Always mixed up with drugs. Coroner thinks he’s been dead about two hours, which puts time of death at about eight thirty. Neighbor says he saw the roommate’s truck peeling out of the yard around then. Girlfriend walked in about nine and found the body. Called her dad right away, and he called the BIA police.” Another glance backward, this time in the direction of the clot of people on the other side of the yard. “Tammy Dotson. You know her?”
    Father John shook his head. The name huddled somewhere in his memory, but he couldn’t pull it free. He followed the agent’s glance. The girl huddled in the center of the group, a childlike look about her in the shadowy light. Head bent forward, long, black hair clumped around the shoulders of her white tee shirt, she stared at the ground, oblivious to the man and woman on either side of her, arms looped around her waist. Probably her parents, Father John thought. The woman was an older version of the girl herself—the same downward bent of the head, the same black hair flaring over her shoulders. The man wore a white cowboy hat that sat back on his head, as if it had settled into its most natural perch. He was tall—the two women came barely to his shoulder—and he stood with shoulders squared, squinting downward at the yellow tape flapping in the breeze, the people flowing back and forth between groups, stamping their feet, nodding, murmuring into the hushed quiet.
    â€œYou know the way the moccasin telegraph works,” the agent went on. “Scott’s dad and the rest of the Whitebird family got here in about twenty minutes.” Gianelli cleared his throat, as if to clear away a minor nuisance. “No weapon around. Killer most likely took it, but we’re checking anyway. Couple of BIA officers are combing the area down by the creek in back of the house. “
    The front door swung open and a man stepped backward onto the stoop, pulling the end of a gurney, white sheet trailing over the sides. The man started down the steps and the gurney bumped after him, guided by an attendant at the other end.
    â€œGo ahead.” Gianelli nodded. Father John stepped across the tape and walked over to the gurney. One of the attendants gave him a weary, here-we-go-again-another-homicide smile. Father John pulled back the white sheet, exposing the face of a young man, with black hair falling loosely over a high forehead, a finely sculpted nose and cheekbones, full mouth turned upward in a half smile of surprise, and eyes closed, almost peaceful in death. Father John made the sign of the cross over the still body. “May God receive you into your eternal home, Scottie, and look not upon your sins, but upon all the good you brought into the world. May you be at peace in His everlasting love.”
    As Father John stepped aside, the gurney started rattling over the hard earth toward the coroner’s wagon, an attendant still at each end. Randolph Whitebird appeared out of the shadows. Leaping across the yellow tape, he started